There has been an irritating, shallow and divisive genre of Indigenous rights books prevalent in Canada over the past 10 years, characterized by the authors’ virtue-proclaiming indignation, anger and harsh accusations against “white” Canadians, past and present, over our allegedly “colonialist”, “racist” and “genocidal” conduct towards Indigenous peoples. Nothing we (non-Indigenous Canadians) have done or are doing in our collective Canadian journey seems to meet their high standards. All of these authors are comfortable, middle-class products of modern Canadian life, who don’t seem to see the irony of their relentless and harsh attacks on the values, practices and institutions of the society they are attacking, which very society has made them the comfortable, worldly successes that they are. None of them seem to catch the irony that when they are attacking “whites” or “settlers” or “colonizers” as a group, they are practicing the essence of racism: ascribing negative, innate characteristics to a whole collective of individual people based solely on the fact that, by simple accident of birth or life circumstance, they are people of that particular group, or, in the case of race, “colour,” and thus by definition must supposedly possess all those innate, shared characteristics. (Note to self, given that white is a combination of all colours, and black is the absence of colour, why aren’t we the ultimate “people of colour”? (Not that I care.)
Some examples of these lightweight, overrated and often taxpayer-assisted books- Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse, John Ralston Saul’s The Comeback, Bob Rae’s What Happened to Politics? -are discussed in my book, There Is No Difference. Others- Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society, Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, Harold R. Johnson’s Peace and Good Order, are reviewed elsewhere on this website. Now I consider here one of the best examples of this benignly racist, anti-“reconciliation” genre, Indigenous Nationhood-Empowering Grassroots Citizens, a collection of essays and articles by Ryerson University’s Pamela Palmater. (Fernwood Publishing, 2015)
Ms. Palmater seems to be the CBC’s go-to spokesperson on all issues Indigenous. While she touts her Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw background and fights against native, so-called “assimilation” on all fronts, on screen, judging by her dress and demeanor, she seems the very epitome of a well-to-do, downtown, totally assimilated Indigenous person; a splendid example of a person retaining one’s heritage-identity while at the same time participating fully in modern, metropolitan, 21st century life. In fact, with her Holt-Renfrew look, it’s hard to imagine her comfortably tromping about on any Indian reserve.
Ms. Palmater, with no historical proof whatsoever and contrary to the most basic teachings of anthropology, asserts that pre-contact Indigenous peoples lived in a kind of Paleolithic Eden, characterized by “sophisticated governments, justice systems using trusted laws, prosperous responsible economies which provided for everyone in our nations, (allegedly including “manufacturing”!-author), and “advanced knowledge of mathematics, sciences, medicine, history, philosophy and astronomy.” Their cultural life was supposedly non-sexist, egalitarian and a model of democratic practices, which focused on “getting to consensus.” (Judging by these assertions, there should be a Lost City in there somewhere.)
Ms. Palmater asserts that this harmonious balance was disrupted by the white man- “the settlers and their governments.” Our white ancestors supposedly had two overriding objectives, which, she insultingly asserts, present-day non-Indigenous Canadians still have. The first was to steal their lands. The second was to “eliminate” them or forcibly assimilate them. Elimination, which in many places she calls “genocide”, she alleges occurred through “scalping bounties, small pox blankets, forced sterilizations, torture, neglect, experimentation and murder of Indigenous children in residential schools, trapping us on reserves and providing minimal rations for our survival.” She says the modern version of scalping bounties is “starlight tours, deaths in police custody, murders of peaceful land defenders and thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.”
Assimilation, she says, would occur by way of Indian Act controls and policies, deliberate destruction of their languages and cultures in residential schools, the “60’s scoop” and forcing Indigenous children into State care.
As a remedy she asserts that the “right-wing”, “sly”, “brainwashing”, “propagandist”, “consciously “racist”, “lethal”, “genocidal” colonizers and the governments of the “colonizers” must be “kicked out of our heads.” (Meaning Indigenous Canadians’ heads- The first things to go then must be IPhones, then TVs, then automobiles, which I’m sure Ms. Palmater, so as to lead by example, has already dispensed with. She’s probably also gotten rid of her espresso maker by now as well. ) In effect a mental and psychological “decolonizing”- a cleansing and purifying- of the Indigenous mind must happen- a good version of 1984! Murray Sinclair, who wrote the Introduction to Ms. Palmater’s book, might be a good person to use for that.
The other remedy she puts forward is for Indigenous peoples to fight the “enemy”- “the entirety of the colonial structures, powers, laws, authorities and measures used to maintain us in poverty and to dispossess and oppress our peoples. State power must be confronted, dismantled, and rebuilt in the original vision for this territory- on a Nation-to–Nation basis…The colonizer must be pushed back once and for all and our sovereignty asserted…This is the way back to healing, nation-building and bringing balance back to our nations.”
To merely reproduce the above from her book is to realize how intellectually juvenile and naïve her analyses and suggested remedies are. It’s real sidewalk café revolution stuff. But her writings represent a Mount Everest of false assumptions, historical ignorance, one-sidedness, racial stereotyping, material omissions, deliberate misstatements, absence of context, nuance and tragic realism, self-interestedness and many other such instances of irresponsibility and/or incompetence. Notwithstanding this, her writings represent pretty well the prevailing orthodoxy outwardly embraced by our cultural, academic and political elites in this area of Canadian life.
The vast majority of vulnerable, powerless, marginalized Indigenous people are being continuously hurt and disadvantaged by this orthodoxy, so it’s necessary to challenge it- to attempt to refute it- for their sake– with an equally Mount Everest-sized, factual counter-narrative. I have tried to do this with my book, There Is No Difference. So the reader will have to go there for what I believe is a cogent, fact-based rebuttal to every questionable assertion of fact and argument Ms. Palmater makes in her book. (She would no doubt brand me as a “racist” for daring to question her and to voice my “assimilationist” opinions on this subject matter.)
Notwithstanding this, so as not to be accused of doing what Ms. Palmater does throughout her entire book- i.e. make merely conclusory assertions with no facts to back them up- called “unargued persuasion” in my book- I offer immediately below the following brief rebuttals or comments on the sole elements that Ms. Palmater lists as proof of Canada’s policy of “elimination” or “genocide”. (There are much longer rebuttals- tedious even- in There Is No Difference.)
Scalping bounties– This happened once in Canadian history. In 1759 Halifax’s General Cornwallis, during the French and Indian War, issued a scalp bounty declaration. It was an act of war. He was heavily criticized for it. It was not and never was broad national policy. It happened before Canada was a country. An isolated act. Scalping was “business as usual” amongst Indian tribes, and scalped each other more than scalping happened between Indians and Europeans. Fleeing a losing battle during the Blackhawk War (1832) two hundred Sauk and Fox warriors swam across the Mississippi River, only to be scalped or taken hostage by hostile Sioux who were waiting for them on the other side.
Small pox blankets– This may or may not have happened- once- at Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) in 1763, during the same war. An act of war, (and it was a savage war) during a time when smallpox was raging in any event. An isolated act. It was not ever broad government policy. It happened, if it happened, before Canada was a country. It involved 2-3 blankets. It happened, if it happened, in the present USA.
Forced sterilization– It happened in Saskatchewan over a period of 20-25 years, starting in the 1930’s, a racist time when many non-Indigenous vulnerable, poor, black and disabled women in America were suffering the same wrongdoing. A one-off series of events in one province. It was not national policy. It was not the policy of Canada, rather the policy of one province for a limited time.
Residential schools– started in the 1870’s, when authentic pre-contact Indigenous culture had already greatly disappeared after 250 years of Indigenous “appropriation” of British-Canadian technology, trade. and culture. They were instituted to save a people, not destroy a people. See chapter 40 of There Is No Difference for a long discussion of this topic.
Reserves– Pierre Trudeau tried to get rid of them by his 1969 White Paper, and Indigenous chiefs refused to give them up. Indigenous peoples are “trapped” on them by their own unwillingness to give them up.
“Starlight tours”, death in police custody, murder of peaceful land defenders– No details given by Ms. Palmater (as usual). If they happened, they were isolated and one-off incidents. They were not any kind of government program or policy.
Murdered and missing women and girls– Most murdered by spouses or partners. Not any kind of government policy. Isolated tragic events, the basic cause of which is the very existence of Indian reserves, which Ms. Palmater wants to keep.
The immediately above exemplifies Ms. Palmater’s wrongful, illogical, ahistorical tendency to take isolated incidents and exceptions and blow them up into general rules.
The late Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel rejected the concept of collective guilt- of succeeding generations being judged guilty for the wrongdoings of their ancestors. Canadians should accept Mr. Wiesel’s wise and compassionate view of this, (he lived the Holocaust and his views deserve to be deferred to), and reject the shallow, finger-pointing, anachronistic, collective-guilt accusations of Ms. Palmater and her ilk.
The complete absence of any sense of historical proportion- of historical context- of tragic realism– of any acknowledgment or discussion of the fact that the inherently tragic events which occurred in Canadian history caused by the migration of Europeans to what is now Canada, and the ensuing collision of cultures and differing human interests that inevitably followed, constituted but one small example amongst countless thousands of an eternal, world-wide phenomenon, in one form or another, of dispossession, that has so tragically played out year after year throughout historical time. These crucial absences must cause Ms. Palmater’s book to be condemned with the verdict of being bad history,at the very least.
And this kind of bad history- this kind of obviously incomplete history-this kind of negligent, intellectually lazy ignoring of the complexity of history- this kind of myth-making, forgetful and self-deceptive history-this kind of history that almost wilfully and knowingly demands, all in the name of achieving some higher “cause”, that so many crucial facts and realities be omitted- is dangerous history.
It’s dangerous because all it’s good for is propaganda- for creating and perpetuating what writer Christopher Hedges called “the myth of separateness”- the bane of the world today, and, locally, a key cause of all the harm and dysfunction befalling Indigenous peoples in Canada.
It’s dangerous because, in its simplicity and in its self-serving closed-mindedness, it exemplifies the saying to the effect that any “ism”- any race-based movement- rejects ambiguity, where truth lies, in favour of an artificial, unreal uniformity.
It’s dangerous because it exemplifies the shallow and harmful tendency to ascribe all the problems experienced by Indigenous-Canadians today to one great cause: “colonialist” dispossession and “racism”.
Jordan Peterson rightly warns us to beware of single cause interpretations, and beware of the people who purvey them.
Indigenous Nationhood downplays the fact, and treats it almost as inconvenient, that, since the late 1960’s, mainly ameliorative government actions and spectacular Indigenous court victories have dominated the Canadian Indigenous-non-Indigenous relational landscape.
It ignores the present reality that, day by day, our present era offers more racial decency than any previous era, that at no point in Canadian history has there been more freedom from anti-Indigenous racial impediments, and that at no point in our history has there been more reasons for young Indigenous men and women to be hopeful that investing in themselves within a united Canada, where everyone is equal under the law, will pay dividends for the future.
The false message sent to ordinary Indigenous persons in relation to all this – especially the message that those vulnerable, impressionable younger ones get – is that, because Indigenous Canadians are still supposedly suffering and disabled because of “colonialism” and such events as the residential schools experience – because they still need to be “reconciled” because of “cultural genocide” and the “broken treaties”, even though all that allegedly happened generations ago – they don’t have the same abilities as other peoples to properly process and overcome their history – they can’t do what the Jewish, Ukrainian and Eastern Europeans peoples did after World War Two– what American blacks, who suffered centuries of slavery and Jim Crow laws, are trying to do. They can’t do what Chinese and Japanese-Canadians did- what all the other peoples throughout history who found themselves in the same tragically-dispossessed situation had to do- and did–they can’t overcome their history.
Unlike to those other peoples, many with a far harsher and tragic past of sorrow and pity, the message to ordinary Indigenous Canadians from our non-Indigenous and Indigenous elites, including Ms. Palmater, is that, without the utopian, impossible–to-even-define-much-less -achieve “sovereign nation-to-sovereign nation” relationship, they are forever crippled and dependent and therefore hardwired to fail.
What a sad, wrong, condescending, defeatist and irresponsible message.
What a classic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It’s a sure recipe for the continued segregation, demoralization and social and economic failure of the Indigenous peoples of Canada, who deserve better than more of the “separate but equal”, quasi-apartheid status quo, which , essentially, is all that Ms. Palmater and all her fellow elites have to offer.
Peter Best, December 20th, 2019
